I installed Mandrake 10.1 around a week ago, the main purpose being to enable me to recover my Windows partition, which was (and is) suffering from a registry hive corruption. I have details on solving that problem, but it involves moving things around on the drive, etc. Anyway, luckily I had a spare partition ready for linux anyway, so went ahead and installed. I knew I'd have to play around with things to get Mandrake writing to the windows partition (NTFS formatted); I have already recompiled my kernel to add NTFS write-support to the build, and removed the "ro" command in /etc/fstab, for the windows partition, which is mounted at /mnt/windows/ . I can read-access the partition fine, and have done a back-up of everything I don't want to lose, just in case.

After all this, the partition was still mounted read-only; chmod +w /mnt/windows gives the following error: "chmod: changing permissions of 'windows': Read-only file system". Clearly, I must be missing something, but my only linux-able real-life friend is stumped. Can anybody give me any pointers?

He who asks is a fool for 5 minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever...

If I remember correctly, Recovery Is Possible enables you to write to NTFS. It's a mini distro that uses the native Windows ntfs.dll (or whatever gubbins they use). I have never used it myself, but a quick google for Recovery Is Possible might do the trick...

Hmm, thanks for that towy71. No, I didn't replace "ro" with anything, which may well be the answer, but considering that FAQ, I might just do some more detailed research before actually trying that. As I said, I've backed up everything I actually really want, and then some, but re-installing and configuring XP to my exact tastes is not what I want to spend this lovely hot summer doing .

Configuring linux, on the other hand, I am perfectly happy to spend the summer doing

Oh, and FYI, that FAQ *is* more than 6 months old. Mandrakelinux/Mandriva may well have fixed NTFS-writing already; I intend to find out right away...

He who asks is a fool for 5 minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever...

I could be wrong but as far as I know the NTFS rw only lets you modify files to the same size, not delete, increase size of file, etc...
I haven't looked at the drivers in a while though as I haven't required them,